it should have. I posted in a recent related thread forecasting this exact same thing would happen. Really, is anyone surprised by this? Lately the law seems to be a lot more interested in finding ways to boost their revenue than to protect the public.

I'm one of those who thinks the LAW needs to be changed, not the enforcement. i.e. Go ahead and put cameras on redlights and all along highways. Catch lots of people speeding. And then change the law to be more reasonable, such as 85 on the interstate (which is actually designed to handle 120 per the original Congressional act). Setting speeds artificially low at 65 or 55, when everyone is driving 80, and the road engineers recommend 80, makes no sense.

Except, of course, it is in the best financial interest of both the "lawmakers" and the "law enforcement" (not to mention all the private ex-cop/ex-military contractors involved) to lower the speed limit further. More revenue that way and the "voter" has no real recourse anyhow (corporate stooge A vs corporate stooge B). The usual arguments about how "speed kills" and "fuel economy" can be successfully utilized all the way down to speed somewhere around 0mph.

I can't find the exact statistic now, but I remember reading how the percent of fatal accidents skyrockets as speed increases...this tidbit supports my statement above:

Speeding increases the crash energy by the square of the speeds. For example, when impact speed increases from 40 to 60 mph (a 50 percent increase), the energy that needs to be managed increases by 125 percent! IIHS [iihs.org]

In other news, did you know that, as impact speed increases from 5 mph to 25 mph, the energy that needs to be managed increases by 2400 percent!? That is just stunning! I think that we must start considering the children here, and lower all speed limits to 5 mph immediately. And ban driving in parking lots. With all of the obstructed views, it is just too dangerous, and I am not going to be held responsible for teaching my children about running into streets blindly.

Having gone 85+ legally on the open road, I'd have to say that there is no "too fast" that is right for everyone, and with proper lane discipline (a la autobahn), mixes of speed can be reasonably safe.

And, in my experience, there's nothing that could ever be said to someone who thinks 85+ is always too fast that would be met with logical and reasoned response. Perhaps he has my experiences as well and just decided to skip a little ahead to the inevitable conclusion. I'm form Texas. I've crested a hill i

In Montana, the only real speed limit I noticed was how fast you can go around a mountain bend without flying off into oblivion.

Same goes for parts of Arkansas. Locals must think Highway 7 is just peachy. We call it the highway of screaming death. You look at the speed limit and laugh. You'd have to be insane to actually go that fast along those turns.

I found one highway in Oklahoma where the speed limit was 75, though, and it was just a straight needle off into infine nothing (this *was* Oklahoma). I'd nev

I wouldn't be driving much over 85, if at all, if the limit were that high to be honest. I feel comfortable doing 80-85 on the NJ Turnpike (I95) as-is; setting the speed limit at 85 isn't going to change that.

There have been many unbiased studies done which have concluded that having a large differential in speeds between vehicles is far more dangerous and responsible for far more accidents than the actual speed itself. Also, studies have found that increasing the speed limit does not cause drivers to exceed the new limit and in fact sometimes actually reduced the average speed of drivers.

Unfortunately, legislators set rules and regulation based upon unfounded hysteria, gut feelings and revenue purposes instead

Given that cars usually don't go much faster than 90-120 and suck at mileage and maintenance at those levels I don't think it will be a huge problem unless you give everyone exotic sports cars. 80 is a good speed and you'll get much better mileage on cruise control than continuously accelerating and braking for slow people that drive 50 while everyone else drives 65. My car doesn't even go into it's 5th gear at 55mph unless I maintain the speed for a while so I'm usually stuck in 4th. You'll also get less t

Evidence suggests that no matter what the posted speed, people will drive exactly as fast as they feel safe driving. Unfortunately, they may feel safer than they actually are and that's where the trouble starts. Measures that make a road feel less safe inevitably cause people to slow down. The only thing the posted limit changes is the size and number of tickets.

Evidence suggests that no matter what the posted speed, people will drive exactly as fast as they feel safe driving.

That's interesting, and anecdotally, seems to make sense. But I suspect speeding tickets have more than "no effect", since I personally changed my driving habits after receiving one (and after having to pay the premium for such behavior on my insurance for years). Care to share links to studies?

Having driven through states or at least areas of states with the speed limit at 80 (or higher) I can attest that most people on the roads do not drive that fast. They maybe go 75. If we increased our speed limits up to 80 or 85, I really don't think people would go much faster, at least not for a number of years. Yes, some would still go faster but 85 in a car is quite fast and not a lot of people are really comfortable at that speed.

And then change the law to be more reasonable, such as 85 on the interstate (which is actually designed to handle 120 per the original Congressional act). Setting speeds artificially low at 65 or 55, when everyone is driving 80, and the road engineers recommend 80, makes no sense.

The problem with raising the speed limit higher than 70 or so is that a lot of cars can't handle that speed. Maybe when they were new, but I see a lot of mobile trash heaps (or just obviously unmaintained cars) that I wouldn't want to be anywhere in the vicinity of travelling that fast. Things are probably a bit better now with new cars required to have tire pressure monitors, but even then, I know a lot of people that totally ignore the warning light. So, doing the responsible thing (slowing down) would ju

I'm one of those who thinks the LAW needs to be changed, not the enforcement. i.e. Go ahead and put cameras on redlights and all along highways. Catch lots of people speeding. And then change the law to be more reasonable, such as 85 on the interstate (which is actually designed to handle 120 per the original Congressional act). Setting speeds artificially low at 65 or 55, when everyone is driving 80, and the road engineers recommend 80, makes no sense.

Uh, just curious, did the "original Congressional act" take into account the fact that there are still accident-prone humans behind the wheel of that 120MPH "design"?

And I'm also curious, are the road engineers also taking into account the massive aggregate increase in (foreign) oil consumption when everyone starts driving faster and faster while even hybrid fuel economy drops into the shitter?

We can't even keep the driving while texting problem under control with the speeds they're at now, I can't imagine

And then change the law to be more reasonable, such as 85 on the interstate (which is actually designed to handle 120 per the original Congressional act).

. . . and those laws were based on what 1960s' suspension and brake technology can handle. Now the limit on those designs should be much higher, given that practically every car in showrooms today will pull.7g lateral acceleration (most will do.8 or better, and many will do better than.9), have disc brakes all around (so little to no fade), will tend to

It does no good to lower the death rate as a percentage of accidents by lowering the speed limit if that in turn results in an increase in the rate of accidents. The probability of a risk is dependent largely on the difference in speed between the slowest and fastest vehicles, so by setting the limit too low, you're not necessarily helping.

Want to lower the death rates? Raise the standards for automobile crash safety. Any other method of achieving such gains is almost invariably illusory. When cars are unnecessarily out on the road because of congestion caused by too-low speed limits, you're adding pollution that statistically kills people, too. It's just a lot harder to measure that causation.

Besides, the safety issues for the users have been dramatically improved since the 1970s, to such an extent that if 65 MPH roads were safe in the 1970s, a 100 MPH road is safe by that safe standard today. Yet speed limits have not increased. Thus, the position that speed limits are set based on safety simply cannot be justified in light of the evidence at hand.

The only good justification for a low speed limit is a large amount of pedestrian traffic, and only because they don't have cars to protect them in a collision. For highways, for maximum safety, the speed limit should be set at a speed that is safe for the road, and should be on electronic signs so they can lower it if road conditions are bad. And it should be set high enough that anyone exceeding it is clearly nuts.

>>Besides, the safety issues for the users have been dramatically improved since the 1970s, to such an extent that if 65 MPH roads were safe in the 1970s, a 100 MPH road is safe by that safe standard today. Yet speed limits have not increased. Thus, the position that speed limits are set based on safety simply cannot be justified in light of the evidence at hand.

Are you talking about a divided roadway or a rural two lane road, where the passing lane for people going one way is incoming traffic for peo

That's unrelated to minimum speeds. "Left lane for passing only" and enforcing that is all that's needed. If someone cruises in the left lane, hit them with a $500 fine and 6 points on their license (something akin to the maximum speeding fine and points value).

The speed limit was set lower to be a fuel saving device in the 70s Spped is not the problem, If everyone on the roads are doing the same speed be it 40 or 100, there is less danger. The danger comes into play when you have people doing 40 in a 65 and cars catching at a high rate of speed, that and people who find it ok to do that in the left lane (passing lane).

The National Maximum Speed Law (NMSL) in the United States was a provision of the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act that prohibited s

Speed is set at 55mph or 65mph because of safety issues for the users, not just road capabilities.

When 55 was lifted, there was a prediction of mass death. The fatality rate decreased. The same when 65 was lifted. There are no "safety issues" involved with raising limits from 55 to 80, and in fact, from the results after the US did it, it's safer to mark a road at 80 than 55.

TomTom asks users if they would like to share 'anonymous' (since leaving place X and returning there every weekday is kinda indicatory) traffic information with TomTom in order to improve services. The fine print says that TomTom can also make this information available to 3rd parties.

One of those 3rd parties is a research company. They take datasets and provide condensed reports based on them.

One of the reports they generated revealed either A. where people were speeding or B. simply what speed people were driving. Not individual users - just a breakdown of numbers. N data points, X% of those N > 120kph, Y% between 100kph and 120kph, etc.

This report is what the police apparently use to decide that if every day there's 1,000 people going 140 where they're only supposed to go 100 (arguments of whether 140 is safe etc. is another story), they should place some speed traps there.. be that to make a safer situation, as a cashcow, or simply because they felt like annoying the speeding drivers.

That's it. There wasn't a direct line from TomTom to the police. In addition, that same information is used by the government to determine if perhaps an extra lane should be added, or whether the speed limit should actually be increased (it's usually environment/noise regulations that limit roads to a certain speed).

Now TomTom, pretty much pandering to their audience (the ones that download speed trap location POI's being pretty much the majority) by saying they're going to adjust the terms of use of the datasets so the police couldn't do what they did anymore.

I have no idea how TomTom thinks they're gonna do that, given that they have no direct relationship with the police -and- the data can be used for perfectly good things as well. Tell the research company they can only sell on the distilled information to the government if they include a clause that the police can't use this information to place speed traps?What if one of the research companies simply dumps the average speed on major roads as a picture or google maps data on the internet. Now what - that picture/google maps information needs a clause saying "If you're a cop, you can't use this information"?

Hence the 'pandering to their audience'. There's pretty much nothing they could actually do to halt the use of information for purposes that their customers aren't too keen on, other than simply not selling the data at all.

Once they release the data to anyone, they might as well assume it can go anywhere.

One has to wonder why TomTom didn't just innovate better or charge more if they wanted more revenue. I say this because I'm pretty confident that most people I know owning TomToms and other GPS devices are under the belief that the data is coming to them, not going to tomtom -- and that they would be pretty offended to know that ANYTHING is being done with their location data.

One has to wonder why TomTom didn't just innovate better or charge more if they wanted more revenue/

I'd say that's pretty obvious - their primary business used to be selling hardware, and that has been hammered by Smartphones and in-dash Nav systems.

They then ported their software to run on those Smartphones, but the pricing pressure from intense competition for Smartphone Nav software (there are now at least *11* available for the iPhone!) has eroded much of that revenue as well.

Here's the problem: Even if you roll your own GPS/Nav, the Tom Tom data the government obtained will still be used against you. They won't just be pulling over Tom Tom users for speeding; this data "breach" (wasn't really) affects every single driver. So one company kind of ruined it for all of us.

It might be worth checking your plugin options too is you use AdBlock, NoScript or similar - they may be inadvertently blocking some script in the site that is incorrectly identified (by some heuristic, or a blacklist updated by user intervention) as an unwanted bit of code.

Some sites deliberately mix their general script detection in with the ad servicing to discourage people from browsing their sits with adverts blocked, though I doubt this is the case with openstreetmap as it doesn't seem to have any

Don't the police already have accident reports? Why do they need more information?

Accident reports would be a great indicator if all they were looking for was preventing accidents. It wouldn't cover everything, but when the concern is public safety it's definitely a great metric.

The skeptic in me has to mention that, while I can't speak for Europe, I know that some towns in the US really rely on income generated from tickets and fines. In which case they would want to place traps in places more likely to catch offenders.

I know that some towns in the US really rely on income generated from tickets and fines. In which case they would want to place traps in places more likely to catch offenders

That is a large part of the problem right there. A lot of these towns love to use speed limits that jump up and down. There is a stretch of highway not far from me that goes from 55 to 25 to 35 to 25 to 35 to 45 all within about a mile stretch. Its blatant that its purpose is solely to catch drivers unfamiliar to the area. (Speeds in MPH)

Let's see... come into town right at the elementary school, get out of the school zone for a little while, then go by the high school, then head into a less-dense area of town, then leave it. Sounds like a lot of small towns, including my hometown. Write the city council and complain about the inconsistent limits. Ask for that middle 35 section to be lowered to 25 to benefit drivers.

The speed limit changes tend not to follow rhyme or reason. Sure, school zones are understandable, but in the small town near me, there is a road with a 35 MPH limit for all but about 50 feet in the middle where it's 30. There is nothing different about that 50 feet except the speed limit and the likelihood of a cop car being parked behind the bushes.

Accident reports are only good for determining where the combination of speed + road conditions are a hazard. They aren't good at finding long stretches of good road surface, with lower traffic volumes and good sight lines that allow very good drivers to shave several minutes off their commute by driving well over the posted speed limit.

The "best" places for speed traps, according to the Dutch police, are not dangerous spots but the spots that generate the most revenue. For example, a dual carriageway that looks like one where 80km/h is the norm, is safe for and built for 80, but actually has a limit of 50km/h because it happens to be in the (poorly signposted) city limits.

A typical example: cops expressed shock that over 90% of drivers passing a speed trap were exceeding the speed limit, which was reduced because of road works. They

If their main concern was public safety, the accident reports would be all they needed or wanted to know.

If their main concern is revenue generation, they'll want to know where people are speeding the most. This is not so interesting for safety since people would likely go slower if the situation was unsafe, and if it was less safe than it seemed, the accident reports would point it out.

If the purpose is to improve traffic safety, then TomTom does not need to provide real time data. They can provide one week delayed data. I don't think TomTom folks are that stupid not to know that the real time feed would allow cops to put speed trap. If a lawsuit is filed and internal emails are obtained, it would reveal the truth (but only if is done soon enough before they destroy the emails).

The true reason TomTom is because they were not expecting more efficient speed traps, just retroactive speeding tickets based on the included personal information that was tied up to your driving logs.

The company claims they assumed that the data would be used to improve traffic safety and road engineering, and were shocked, shocked to discover that instead the police used it to figure out the best places to put speed traps.

Well duh. Those two phrases mean exactly the same thing in the newspeak.

Despite the egregious lack of corporate responsibility, perhaps there could be some useful application of the data for traffic safety and road engineering.. for instance, if traffic engineers can see what roads are congested which have too low of a speed limit imposed, they could propose raising them? A pipe dream, but I have to believe someone looking to optimize traffic flows would consider the design upside as well as the police simply considering how to generate revenue.

Despite the egregious lack of corporate responsibility, perhaps there could be some useful application of the data for traffic safety and road engineering.. for instance, if traffic engineers can see what roads are congested which have too low of a speed limit imposed, they could propose raising them? A pipe dream, but I have to believe someone looking to optimize traffic flows would consider the design upside as well as the police simply considering how to generate revenue.

What's in that pipe you used for dreamin'?The most probable behavior is for the cops to lower the speed limits on other roads and install some new speed traps there.

For all those devil's advocates out there that think it's still possible for the police to have ambivalent intentions behind this action...

Keep in mind that to actually do the most good, all they really need to do is look at locations of most accidents in previous years, and regulate driving upstream of that. It's just that of-course the cause of these accidents might be attributable to road conditions and not necessarily excessive speed.

Are they really that clueless? You would think that if they were that thick, they wouldn't be able to hold on to their market. Every dick and harry (not tom:) would be able to produce devices that rendered theirs obsolete, over priced and under featured.

You can easily spot the difference with any unit when comparing to a Garmin. If it tells you frequently to "keep left" or "stay on the road" then it is using pretty raw data.

I've had a Garmin insist that I was on the outer road for several miles after I missed my exit, so I'd take that with a grain of salt. More likely they're just making it less picky about whether you're actually on the road it thinks you're on.

I recently picked up a new client who needed a fair amount of work done to their small network/computers. The location thou is about as far as I advertise my services and had they not needed all the work that they do I would have likely referred them to someone more local. As my profits would not have been worth it with the current gas prices even with my decently efficient vehicle.

So in driving out there so often I have noticed how often the speed limits will change in even just a few miles. Going from

As such I've been starting to ponder as I make these drives who the hell is doing this to us? Is it law enforcement or civil engineers who are saying that that 5mph for a few blocks is a good idea?

There are some places in northern New Jersey where the speed limit changes every few blocks because you are changing municipalities and each little town sets its own speed limit. It is incredibly annoying for all the reasons you mentioned.

Most likely the little stretch where the road is 35 MPH is within the jurisdiction of a nearby town (perhaps one you can't see) that annexed over just far enough to grab a little piece of the road. That allows them to set the limit on that part, which they did. When the road leaves the town, the speed returns to the county's rate. Then you reach the next little town...

It would be better if the state restricted the ability of cities to enforce speed limit reductions based on jurisdictional boundaries, and

Any officer or city official in plain clothes who travels to and from any location and takes different routes and clearly identify where hot spots are for speed traps. The reality is that once GPS data is turned over there a database may be compiled following the path of any unidentified subject and begin to pinpoint common begin and end points. Eventually, they will use such data in a court of law as a matter of historical record.

People have a problem with this method of collecting data because people did not (at least knowingly) agree to have Tom Tom store data on where they traveled and when and how fast and then sell it. I believe they are right to expect that the company not do that. Sure, it's probably buried in some ToS or the like somewhere, but I'm firmly on the "shit buried 20 pages deep in fine print legalese is not a fair warning or agreement" side of the fence.

Somehow more than one Slashbot has read "aggregate data" and concluded that this means both "real-time" and "not at all aggregate". To clarify, the data that TomTom sends is something of this rough form: A list of sections of road. For each stretch of road, they have data on average speed and average traffic. Whether this is a 24 mean, or more fine grained than that they haven't said. Nevertheless, it's not individual records, its averaged over all users. The amount of traffic is an important metric.

GPS as far as I know works in one direction. How does TomTom collect data? They upload it if you log in on the net for an update?

Neither of TFA's linked in the summary are very long, your answer is in the second one:

When you use one of our products we ask for your permission to collect travel time information on an anonymous basis. The vast majority of you do indeed grant us that permission. When you connect your TomTom to a computer we aggregate this information and use it for a variety of applications, most importantly to create high quality traffic information and to route you around traffic jams.

The whole damn point is to get people to drive safely and punish people who don't.

So are you naive or just stupid?

Speeding is not dangerous in many circumstances, in fact if others are speeding one driver does not he is actually creating a dangerous situation. Road speed limits are set by politicians not proper engineering.

sort of by definition, and as I argued, with a source, excessive speed *is* dangerous, regularly. How fast the road can handle is not the same as how fast people should drive, I'm not sure why one (the engineering speed) would imply the latter (the target speed). Lower speed can significantly improve fuel economy and safety in collisions, and remember the article is for europe, where they are far more concerned with car-people collisions than car-car collisions, this is reflected in different lights, diff

In fact, placing speed cameras based off 3rd party reports of speeding, rather than crash rates, indicates the police are specifically targeting safe drivers to give tickets to. After all, if speeding was unsafe, then they'd have been able to see where the speeders were by the number of call-outs to crashes.

If you want to pay for your own roads you and your state are more than welcome to set your own speeds. If you want federal highway money, you follow the rules given to you. This was the entire impetus behind the 55mph limit imposed during the 70s. Carrot and stick is a highly effective motivator. I don't know if this is used any longer but is the reason most interstates are the way they are.

There are roads out west where its straight and flat and easily able to go 70 or even 90. Those are the exc

Speeds are set by politicians reacting to (and anticipating) the needs and complaints of the public. Sure, people will complain about that one stretch of 25 MPH road that used to be 45 MPH, but they'll also complain about the student getting hit walking home from the new school there. To avoid looking like an ignorant jackass, a savvy politician will try to make the road safe before the school opens. He'll listen to the opinions of traffic engineers, who will adapt existing traffic patterns to accommodate t

My point has nothing to do with whether it's 'enforceable' or not. An exit ramp is fairly subjective but double the posted 'advisory' would still be significant I would think.

My point was that roads are affected by things outside of the roadway themselves and even though the physical roadway is built and able to hand higher speeds, there can be other factors causing a lower posted speed.

ya how exactly is "the best place to put speed traps" NOT being used to improve traffic safety?

A speed trap is a stretch of road where the speed limit is lower than necessary for safety. This stretch is then used to catch people speeding through that section as a revenue generating tool. In the case in the summary I expect that the police force is finding stretches of road where the limit is already lower than it should be from a safety standpoint and using them as a trap.

N.B. If there is a real safety concern then the accident rate would have identified these areas without using the GPS data.

"As in the rest of the nation, most vehicle fatalities in South Carolina and Georgia are attributed to one or more of those three factors: speeding, drunken driving or not wearing a seat belt."

It should be noted that it is common for statistics of this type to be heavy handed. E.g. if a person dies and someone had been drinking then the death is attributed to "drunk driving" even if the death could not have been averted.

It should be noted that if you are driving home with a passenger who is drunk and the driver is 100% sober, and someone who is also sober runs a red light and hits me, the crash is "drinking related." And if the responding officer suspects alcohol, even if the driver blows 0.0 on a breathalyzer, it can be marked down as drinking-related. Also note that there is no finding that will ever remove "drinking related" from a crash statistic. This means that someone who commits suicide (suicide isn't a category

ya how exactly is "the best place to put speed traps" NOT being used to improve traffic safety?

Simple. If the majority of vehicles (or even a significant percentage of vehicles) are driving a given speed, then the road is clearly safe at that speed. Therefore, that's prima facie evidence that whoever set the speed limit lower than that was wrong, either due to negligence (incompetence) or malice (revenue generation).

The burden of proof should be nearly impossibly high when it comes to proving that such li

This argument is essentially "it isn't safe for me to drive at 55 when everyone else is moving at 75". It isn't unsafe because of the law or because the specified maximum speed is 55, it is unsafe because everyone else is breaking the law. That argument can be countered with the standard school teacher response of "if everyone else put their head in fire, would you?". If everyone is breaking the law then by all means charge everyone for it. If you think the speed limit set by law is wrong campaign to have it lifter rather than just ignoring it and breaking the law. The speed cameras would not be "cash cows" if people didn't routinely ignore the speed limits.

Speed limits are not only set for safety in some places. Studies have shown that most road systems, once above a certain % of their carrying capacity, are most efficient (both in terms of average journey time for those taking part in the system and in terms of fuel efficiency) when the maximum speed is set to a value most people would find surprisingly low. This is mainly due to the fact it means people keep a more constant speed, with far less accelerating simply because the speed limit is higher then having to slow down again at the next obstruction (lights, slower moving traffic ahead, turning off into a slower road). Without this constant speed variation in individual vehicles less fuel would be used and there would be less "bunching" which can cause havoc with road system efficiency (meaning average journey times, and fuel waste, rise). Of course for optimum efficiency the speed limit would need to be more dynamic than the current fixed limits, rising on straight stretches at times when the roads are clear to traffic can move freely and safely+efficiently at a higher pace - but would require significant infrastructure investment to implement so may be a pretty bad optimisation in short/medium term.

The debate about speed cameras in high speed areas is interesting. If they were just there for the safety aspect then there may be a case for their being less of them, but there is also a case for speed limits being lower for efficiency reasons in many areas and there would be no way to implement that without the cameras to keep an eye on people.

One place where I would like to see *more* cameras (perhaps moving some of those that are currently monitoring high-speed areas?) is in slower zones where the issue is very much safety. I expect that cameras policing the 15 and 20mph zones near schools, parks, and other quiet residential areas would draw in less cash but would make more of an impact in terms of lives saved and injuries lessened. I've often seen people shoot past a local school here at far more than the posted (but not enforced, aside from the very occasional bobby with a radar gun) 20mph limit - when I had my motor bike I would sometimes be in that flow of traffic and be getting bibbed by the idiot behind me because I was moving at 20ish rather than the 30+ he thought more appropriate. The really irritating thing is that some of the people speeding were speeding away after dropping off their kids at the school (I'm sure they'd complain pretty indignantly if one day their snotty little sprog was skittled by a car or bike that was moving faster than the limit). An efficiency issue would be addressed by this too: all to often you see people putting their foot down at one end of a short street only to slam on the breaks at the other end before they turn, which is probably more wasteful than pushing up from 55 to 75 and back down again.

Well, if you already have a bunch of automated radar along a stretch of highway... Why not just use them to set the speed limit to the observed average speed (up/down to some limit, anyway). It would tend to creep upward toward the limit when traffic was flowing freely, and down as it got more crowded.

It would need to be quite dynamic like that, but the current infrastructure isn't up to that sort of immediate feedback at the moment. To be useful the system would need to consider the wider grid rather than each stretch of road individually, and it couldn't be truly dynamic (dimmer people would get very confused and those trying to get out of a ticket would try claim the system was showing something else at the time) so some research would need to go into the optimum setup in terms of keeping the system s

Except when you check the fine print, it's speed that's in excess of what's safe for the conditions that's a major cause of accidents - not speed in excess of the arbitrary and often politicially motivated legal limits, which is all that speed cameras can detect. (When you check the even finer print, I'm not sure even that is necessarily true, but...)

Since the cops couldn't find the place by looking at crashes, they targeted speeders who weren't crashing. If the point of traffic laws is to increase safety, then the cops were not acting in the best interests of anyone. If the point of traffic laws is to make irrelevant and capricious laws and train people to follow the rules regardless of whether the rules make sense or the armed people will take you away, then yes, that was the right thing for the cops to do.